Dmitri - could you please clarify if your multiple files will be 100% in a single directory? Thanks
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DVKSep 21 '09 at 15:14

1

Why are HTML entities even needed? Wouldn't the correct solution be to advertise the correct character set?
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JoeySep 21 '09 at 15:15

The files are all in one directory BUT they are contained in a variety of sub-folders of the such. So I guess no.
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Dmitri FarkovSep 21 '09 at 15:47

Well, the only point in using HTML entities is to include them in HTML files which either have no or varying character set declarations. If both points do not apply, then mayhaps it's even easier to let the HTML files use the proper encoding which eliminates such character encoding issues pretty nicely.
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JoeySep 21 '09 at 15:51

Um. If you're replacing all non-ASCII characters with HTML entities, then whether the result is saved as ASCII or UTF-8 is moot - it's exactly the same byte representation either way. If there's any difference, then I have to wonder why you're replacing French characters with html entities, but leaving Spanish, German, Chinese, Japanese, and Klingon characters as UTF-8.
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Steve JessopSep 21 '09 at 16:02

Notepad++ supports FINDING in multiple files but it does not do such replacement. It makes you open each file from the list generated and then run Replace in Open Documents.
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Dmitri FarkovSep 21 '09 at 15:10

Except they don't even support lazy modifiers in their regex engine as I noticed today when trying to get something with .*? to match :/
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JoeySep 21 '09 at 15:10

Johannes : Dmitri said reg-ex would be nice, but not essential. Good to point out the limitations though.
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RB.Sep 21 '09 at 15:13

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Dmitri : It does support replace in files - see my edit to my answer.
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RB.Sep 21 '09 at 15:14

Interesting which version are you running? I might be running an outdated version
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Dmitri FarkovSep 21 '09 at 15:18

In the spirit of previous answer, you can use Perl (which has seamless native Unicode support and whose RegEx capablity are unparalleled). There are Windows perl versions avialable (ActivePerl, Strawberry, or you can use CygWin), and you can even slap GUIs on top of it -= for the latter, you can see what answers are given to my very recent So question :)

Plus, Perl can grab pretty much unlimitedly powerful collection of files, by using globs for simple things, File::Find for more complicated, and using grep on resulting file list to refine further if you need more fancy stuff, e.g. by content of modification time.

jEdit has a feature called "HyperSearch" (just open the find dialog). You can specify a directory, a file name pattern and jEdit (being based on Java) does support lots of different encodings (and is often smart enough to figure out the correct one).